The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes: Capital Switching, Spatial Fixes, and the Production of Nature

Ekers, Michael; Prudham, Scott

doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1309962

Cited by 109 publications

(132 citation statements)

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“…In this context, the question of what infrastructures expend in order to enable the smooth functioning of the technosphere becomes paramount. Reflections by Ekers and Prudham (; ) address this question, positing that capital performs ‘socioecological fixes’—or investments in fixed assets, technical systems and landscapes—in particular locales so as to (re)produce the social relations of, or technospheric conditions conducive toward, accumulation. By this rendering, infrastructures are not built in the aftermath of capital's arrival in a place, but are the very means by which capital seeks to ‘remake the environments … of commodity circulation and everyday life’ through the sinking‐in of fixed assets (Ekers and Prudham, : 1373).…”

Section: From Expending Infrastructure To Infrastructure's Expendituresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructure's Expenditures: Changi Airport, Food Cargo and Capital's Technosphere

Lin¹

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Urban research has long maintained that an unwavering link exists between urbanization and infrastructures, with the latter serving as structuring devices that give material and discursive shape to a city's socio‐ecological composition. But, while infrastructures’ mediative power and consequent ecological effects are well established, present scholarship tends to associate them with only a specific set of metabolisms—namely, those tied to urban (re)production—at the expense of wider capitalist projects that may exceed discrete urbanisms. Complexifying this view, this article posits that infrastructures can constitute larger systems and frameworks that help capital achieve networked forms of accumulation. Specifically, it follows recent theorizations on the technosphere—artificialized environments of interacting systems—to demonstrate how infrastructures help drive particular dispositions and modes of production and consumption beyond cities. Through documentary analyses and interviews with industry players, the article uses the emergent food cargo business at Singapore's Changi Airport as an empirical case to exemplify the enfolding of one such technosphere through infrastructures. It shows how paying heed to these technospheric formations exposes hidden expenditures—in this instance, of land, energy and labour—that not only underpin a global regime of (food) circulation, but also result in additional socio‐ecological costs often omitted in urban research.

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Section: From Expending Infrastructure To Infrastructure's Expendituresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructure's Expenditures: Changi Airport, Food Cargo and Capital's Technosphere

Lin¹

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…These regimes increasingly represent forms of ecologically oriented urban entrepreneurialism whose ‘spatial reorganization [is] justified on environmental grounds to address economic crises’ (Cohen and Bakker, : 142). Thus our focus on the urban manifestations of the relationship between carbon control and localized commodity frontiers contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the proliferation, modalities and consequences of eco‐scalar and socio‐ecological fixes (Cohen and Bakker, ; McCarthy, ; Ekers and Prudham, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco‐scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences

Schindler

Kanai²

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…This approach thus allows capitalism to delay "environmental" crises while simultaneously benefitting from those crises (Büscher and Fletcher 2015;Ekers and Prudham 2017;Fletcher 2011). Perhaps the most salient and pervasive form of in situ commodification is found in ecotourism.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…1 As many scholars have argued, the boundary between "nature" and "society" is a hegemonic ontological product, and there have been recent attempts to refer to "socioenvironments" or "socioecologies" (Ekers and Prudham 2017;Moore 2000) to reflect the dialectic relationship of "nature" and "society." Although binary language permeates the literature on capitalism and its effects on socioenvironments, I make an attempt to refer to "socioenvironments/ecologies" rather than "society and environment," where appropriate, in an effort to begin moving away from that binary.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I also enclose words related to this binary in quotation marks to emphasize their ontological origins where appropriate. their value quantifiable (Coffey 2016;Ekers and Prudham 2017;Sullivan 2017b). Thus, market-based "environmental" and conservation projects are necessarily ontological projects where "nature" is produced and capitalist socioenvironmental ontologies become cemented as this capitalist-conservation nexus informs worldwide conservation hegemony (Sullivan 2017a(Sullivan , 2017c, a process that has been termed "eco-governmentality" (Goldman 2001;Ulloa 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Uneven Development and Shifting Socioecological Rifts: Some Unintended Consequences of Dolphin Conservation in Cambodia

Deutsch

2018

Socius

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As sites of global environmental degradation continue to emerge and pose significant threats to life on the planet, the world’s natural resource managers persist in attempts to mitigate and reverse this degradation. However, these mitigation attempts often employ capitalist mechanisms as solutions to problems caused by capitalism. I used one-on-one in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation to examine the socioenvironmental changes associated with an Irrawaddy dolphin conservation project in Cambodia from the perspectives and experiences of the people most affected by the project. I argue that the inability of capitalist mechanisms to address the interconnectedness of “social” and “environmental” problems resulting from capitalism, in this case, appear to have served to exacerbate social inequality and to shift the project’s targeted ecological rift from the rivers to the forests. I also introduce the term “Whack-A-Mole” conservation to refer to this tendency of neoliberal conservation to simply shift socioecological rifts.

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The Metabolism of Socioecological Fixes: Capital Switching, Spatial Fixes, and the Production of Nature

Cited by 109 publications

References 60 publications

Infrastructure's Expenditures: Changi Airport, Food Cargo and Capital's Technosphere

Infrastructure's Expenditures: Changi Airport, Food Cargo and Capital's Technosphere

Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco‐scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences

Uneven Development and Shifting Socioecological Rifts: Some Unintended Consequences of Dolphin Conservation in Cambodia

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